Facebook acquires Instagram [Breaking News]

Facebook whose IPO is on the stand has acquired Instagram.Instagram is a free photo sharing application . It allows users to share photos on a variety of social networking services.

Facebook acquires Instagram

Mark Zuckerberg himself has announced this acquisition in his wall post. He writes

Mark Zuckerberg announcement about acquisition

I'm excited to share the news that we've agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

For years, we've focused on building the best experience for sharing
photos with your friends and family. Now, we'll be able to work even
more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences
for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other.
But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and
building on Instagram's strengths and features rather than just trying
to integrate everything into Facebook.

That's why we're
committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of
people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated
with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more
people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other
services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan
on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks,
the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and
the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your
friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are
important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We
will try to learn from Instagram's experience to build similar features
into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram
continue to grow by using Facebook's strong engineering team and
infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook
because it's the first time we've ever acquired a product and company
with so many users. We don't plan on doing many more of these, if any at
all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why
so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing
these two companies together.

We're looking forward to working
with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we're
going to be able to build together.

This is surely gonna be an interesting development. There are estimates that this acquisition costs Facebook $1 billion.Recently the new Instagram android app which was released was downloaded a million times within first 12 hours.